Autistic and neurodivergent people experience many “sensory icks” regularly. Autistic writer Shamiha Patel shares her personal checklist of sensory triggers.
Tag: acceptance
The book Neurodiversity for Dummies is happening because there really is a dearth of accessible information and resources. This listening session is a conversation about what neurodiversity is, and what neurodivergent people need to thrive.
Autistic people tend to benefit from acceptance much more than from awareness, as awareness is passive whereas acceptance is a choice. Here are ten ways you can honor Autism Acceptance, and autistic people of all ages.
If your child is going through Autistic Burnout, they will need your support. They will need your understanding, flexibility, increased sensory regulation time and a decrease in demands both from family and school environments.
You can listen and understand and believe and respect autistic adults every bit as much as you do those things with autistic children. If you don’t, you’re being ageist.
“The way we diagnose kids overwhelmingly leads to Black and Latino kids getting diagnosed with behavioral disorders instead of autism. It also excludes a lot of women and femme people, to say nothing of transgender males and nonbinary people. We also ignore a lot of people for whom English is a second language.”
We need to highlight the plight of autistic people in Kenya, especially in rural areas where many autistic people are kept hidden and abused. It helps for information about autism in Kenya to appear in blogs and videos.
Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: Photo of a teen wearing a jacket and baseball cap, seen from behind, far ahead on an oaken hillside trail.] Shannon Des Roches Rosa @shannonrosa When I was in physical therapy to rehabilitate a busted knee, the kind, competent therapists tended to make small talk—which invariably meant fielding tentative, well-meaning questions about my autistic son. That gave me the opportunity to model the way I’d like other people to talk and think about him. Here’s how those conversations usually go: PT: “Autism. Um. That must be hard.” Me: “Well, my son is a very awesome person. And he’s actually more easygoing than his siblings. He’s like a lot of autistic people—it’s hard for him to be in places that aren’t autism-friendly, and it can be hard for him to communicate. But he’s a wonderful person.” PT: “That’s really interesting.” (Processes what I’ve said,…
David Gray-Hammond, photo courtesy author [image: A white man with short brown hair, a beard, and glasses. He is wearing a teal shirt and light brown pants.] David Gray-Hammond @emgntdivergence Developing skills in self-advocacy can often seem confusing and frustrating. It requires us to be aware of our needs in a detailed way, while also being able to communicate them in a world that so often seeks to silence us. I have always argued that self-acceptance is the first step to self-advocacy, but in order to accept ourselves, we must first know ourselves. When I found the autistic community, I found thousands of people who understood my experience in a way that others simply could not. It was in this understanding that they taught me the vocabulary that I needed to describe my strengths and struggles (in fact, I did not even know the words to describe my most basic…
How is joy usually characterized? The absence of sadness? Unbridled gladness and glee? That is Knox, every. single. day.